Your VMware Success

Virtualization training has been changing since the 90s when I was getting started. Now, it’s easy to succeed by learning the right technology. Here’s what I mean…

I watched VMware become a global success. Then they were bought twice. First by EMC when they were a startup, and more recently when Dell gobbled up EMC.

All this attention has only made the demand for VMware Engineers skilled in vCloud, vSphere, NSX, VSAN, Horizon continue to grow.

And get this, as VMware popularity grows – your opportunities as a VMware Engineer expand – if you have the right skills.

Listen:

Before I became a VMware Engineer, you installed VMware on a Windows 95 desktop; later it was installed on Windows 2000 Servers. And before vSphere and ESXi, vhosts were all stand-alone servers called GSX server.

Wow, that was a long time ago and VMware keeps getting more popular…

Think about this:

SysAdmins with solid virtualization skills are important and their salary is still increasing year over year!

What VMware Training should I take first?

vSphere consists of the server hardware that hosts the virtual machines.

But what’s interesting is behind vSphere is not only virtual machine hosting but also the role of managing virtual and physical storage and networks.

There’s a lot to learn once you start digging into vSphere. At a minimum, you should be able to set up vSphere from scratch, which includes several ESXi hosts, vCenter, storage, and networking.

These are the basics that will allow creating and administration of virtual machines. Then from vSphere, you can level-up your practical skills to vSAN, NSX, and software-defined data center.

This sounds pretty easy, right?

I was a help desk tech when I started, and since then, I’ve helped build and support almost a 1000 ESX hosts and nearly 10,000 VMs. I’ve remotely managed vSphere environments around the world and you can too with the right training…

Now let’s talk about VMware video training.

Most of what I’ve learned has been self-taught, and there was a time when I wore my VCP CERT as a badge of honor. I even wrote and published a Kindle book called VCP for Hire.

To get the CERT I had to attend a unique course only offered by VMware – otherwise, even if I passed the test, it wouldn’t count because my class wasn’t the “Official” VMware brand.

BTW, this requirement hasn’t changed, but let me be honest about vSphere and certifications.

You don’t need a VCP6 CERT to become a vSphere administrator. Nor do you need to attend unique courses costing $4,000 for a one-week boot camp.

Look:

If you want, you can download a trial version of vSphere and set up a lab for almost free.

And there are plenty of YouTube videos available to get you started.

But if you want more than to just scratching the surface, then I recommend spending a few dollars on Udemy and getting a full step by step vSphere video course that will give you vSphere skills that’ll help you to land a “Monster” VMware Administrator job.

You never know what new opportunities are around the corner.

Are you in a help desk job or just out of school and you don’t have experience?

Do you want to learn how to setup and manage vSphere and get promoted from help desk or tech support to SysAdmin?

You can move up, but you need to keep adding new skills that are in demand so you get noticed by hiring managers.

I was in the very same place when I started, but I had to spend thousands of dollars on my VMware training because Udemy didn’t exist back then. How lucky you are!

Today on Udemy you can get started in a few minutes learning the newest version of vSphere by a seasoned professional.

Then, if you want to get certified, you can pay for official VMware course and the test will be easier to pass because you’re not starting from zero if you’ve been watching Udemy training videos.

Sample Video by Rick Crisci – VMware vSphere 6 Concepts

Virtual Machine (VM) Disk Types - VMware vSphere Training Transcript

In this video we’ll take a look at the virtual disk options that are available for virtual machines and we do have a few different options. When it comes to VM disks so just like memory and CPU, the virtual machine doesn’t really have any storage hardware; doesn’t have any actual disks. It’s accessing a shared resource and in that case, this resource is called the datastore so Windows or whatever our guest operating system needs to see what it believes the storage hardware. So we’ll trick our guest operating system by providing it drivers for a virtual scuzzy controller so in this case, we have a Windows VM. And when the Windows needs to read or write data it’s going to issue SCSI commands and those scuzzy commands will be sent to the virtual SCSI controller from there the storage commands hit our ESXi host. They hit our hypervisor and they’re redirected towards the appropriate VMDK for this virtual machine. So here we see an SCSI command flowing out of the Windows virtual machine hitting the storage adapter and arriving at the datastore. Now there are some options for the virtual disk itself and the most common choice is to use a thin provisioned disk right so let’s assume that this virtual machine is created with an 80 gig virtual disk but it only has 40 gigabytes of actual data. Well, this means that only 40 gigabytes of space is actually used on the datastore and that’s the big benefit of a thin provisioned disk is it is very space efficient. A thick provisioned disk is different when you create a thick provision disk all of that space is immediately consumed as soon as it’s allocated so a thin provisioned disk saves space and it’s very efficient a thick provision disk allocates 100 percent of the space upfront and before that space can be used all the blocks must have zeros written to them. The process of writing these zeros can impact applications that write a lot of data like database virtual machines. Now thin provisioned disks zero out these blocks on demand so they zero them out when the application needs them and therefore those virtual disks won’t perform as well as an eager zero to disk. Well, an eager zero disk has zeros written to it upfront at the moment that virtual disk is created so they won’t have to complete that zeroing operation as the application is trying to utilize new space. And so for this reason thick provisioned eager zeroed VMs are recommended for virtual machines with write-intensive workloads such as database virtual machines.

It gets better:

Along with the best VMware course online, you can also search Udemy for Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V and develop skills in another HOT virtual technology.

Here are examples of Windows 2016 Hyper-V training on Udemy.

I guarantee you’ll find video online training for something you want to learn. So go ahead and dive in and start learning vSphere.

Where To Get Online VMware Training?

VMware Learning The OLD Way…

Did you know most of today’s “Official” VMware courses are held online?

To enroll in a course, click the button below which will open a window for the VMware Store where you can browse the list of VMware offered courses. You’ll also be able to buy credits and schedule certifications testing.

Limited Availability

Limited Locations

High Training Cost – $4125

Limited Instructor Lead (Most Classes Are Remote)

Unexpected Cancellations

NOT refundable if you cancel or change the class less than 10 business days before the date